Hi everyone, and I hope summer's enjoyable for all,
We are still in the process of seeing about whether we can get Billy Bragg, but we've also been in some talks with the CCPA. If you remember, we were arranging the Bragg events with Jason from the West End Cultural Centre and the idea was that we would have an event with him at the Ukrainian Labour Temple on the Friday night, and the WECC would have him on the Saturday. The CCPA expressed interest and we had suggested or assumed they might want to do something with him on Sunday.
I recently talked to Molly McCraken from the CCPA. They are concerned that there was not a sufficient audience to have 3 Bragg events and suggested that there be a large, cosponsored event at Knox on the Friday night.
I was initially dubious about this since I didn't want our event to be hijacked. However, I have rethought this a bit. We were originally working with the CCPA on the keynote issue since there were clear benefits for both us and them. For us, it helped mitigate some of the financial concerns about bringing in a big name speaker. I think this remains true of the Bragg event.
It seems to me that we could rearrange things to the benefit of everyone. We could participate in a large Bragg event on the Friday, with heavily discounted tickets to conference attendees (the MFL has contributed $5000 to the Bragg event, and maybe they would be okay with us using it to discount tickets). This would allow us to rethink the Thursday Keynote event. I would suggest (as long as it's not a problem for the Labout Temple) that we hold the keynote there: we could bus people directly from the U of W, serve a light dinner, and have the keynote/social/wine and cheese there.
That's just one possibility, others of you might have others. Let me know what you think,
Jim
James Naylor Professor Department of History Brandon University 270 18th Street Brandon, MB R7A 6A9 Canada
Office: 204 727 9664 Cell: 204 720 2117
Naylor@BrandonU.camailto:Naylor@BrandonU.ca people.brandonu.ca/naylorj/https://people.brandonu.ca/naylorj/
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